Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I read a paper today that said that there are no less than 270,000,000 kilograms of plastic in the ocean, which is about half a billion pounds plus of plastic. So … is this a big number or a small number?
The story is at the Guardian, and they’ve illustrated it with the following picture:
Regarding the story, as usual the Guardian doesn’t disappoint—it hypes the danger of the half-billion pounds of plastic. Hey, good news doesn’t sell newspapers, so I can’t fault them. In any case, they say:
More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain, new research has found.
Now, I suppose that the good folks at the Grauniad think that with their picture they are showing the “damage throughout the food chain” that they claim plastics cause in the ocean … but look at the picture and think about it for a moment.
Does it look like a) that chunk of plastic is inimical to sea life … or does it look like b) that chunk of plastic is acting a substrate upon which abundant sea life is living and serving as fish food? Call me crazy but I’m going for Choice b), you can see the little striped fish chowing down. Now I know that not all plastic is good for sea life … but that plastic certainly is.
However, I started out with the question about whether 270,000,000 kilogrammes is a big number or a small number. Looking at the extent of the ocean gives us a very different picture … because it turns out that the 270,000,000 kilograms of plastic works out to 200 grams of plastic per cubic kilometer of the ocean. Or in old-school measurements, that’s just under two pounds of plastic per cubic mile of seawater. (Some commenters have noted that most of the debris is at or near the surface, so if you prefer, it’s about 900 grams of plastic per square kilometer of ocean surface.)
Now, I’m willing to agree that there are some kinds of plastic that are likely inimical to sealife. Nylon fishing nets that have been lost and gone adrift, for example, continue to kill fish. But the fish aren’t wasted, they’re eaten in turn by a combination of larger and smaller fish until the net washes ashore. So the nets are just another predator. Not saying I like that, I don’t, particularly when they catch whales and other sea mammals … but it’s not the end of the ocean.
And as for the other small pieces of random plastic … well, I just can’t get all that passionate about the dangers of 200 grams of plastic for every BILLION tonnes of sea water, or if you prefer, the dangers of 900 grams of plastic for every square kilometre of ocean surface (1 cubic km = one billion tonnes).
Now, I can hear you thinking, but Willis, what about the great Pacific Gyre, where the plastic collects? First, it’s not like most people think, where you could walk on the plastic and there are islands and such. The density is much higher than the global average, but it’s still only about 2-3 kg per cubic kilometre, or about 5 kg/square km.
However, as a long-time fisherman, I’d bet big money that there is MORE sea life in the Gyre than in equivalent blue-water ocean near the Gyre. The blue water is a desert, in part because there’s nothing for life to grow on. Many kinds of sea life require a “substrate”, something solid to attach to so it can grow. As a result, anything that floats, and I mean anything, will rapidly attract life, just as in the Guardian’s “scary” picture above.
In closing, I don’t like plastic in the ocean, and I’m very, very conscious about it when I’m at sea. I never throw plastic into the ocean. However, as an ocean problem, it’s way, way below things like overfishing and pollution. Those are the real dangers, not a couple hundred grams of plastic in each billion tons of sea water. That’s a small number.
Best to all,
w.
PS—If you disagree with someone, please QUOTE THEIR EXACT WORDS so everyone can be clear just what your objection might be.
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I’m not worried about plastic.
http://enenews.com/govt-scientists-significant-concentrations-radioactive-material-detected-west-coast-levels-doubled-months-previous-tests-marine-chemist-greater-concern-fukushima-releases-will-be-hitting-shores-can
http://enenews.com/study-finds-giant-strontium-90-release-into-body-of-water-begins-around-1000-days-after-meltdown-dec-5-2013-is-a-thousand-days-after-311-graphic-shows-very-high-levels-being-discharged-for-u
http://enenews.com/deadly-strontium-spikes-record-levels-fukushima-reactor-50000000-recent-months-chart
Radiation worries? Here is a table of common items from World Nuclear .Orgs web site
Table 8: Activity concentrations of NORM in building materials (Bq/kg)
Material Ra-226 Th-232 K-40
Concrete 1-250 1-190 5-1570
Aerated concrete 109818 <1-220 180-1600
Clay bricks 1-200 1-200 60-2000
Sand-lime bricks and sandstone 18415 10959 5-700
Natural building stones 1-500 1-310 767011
Natural gypsum <1-70 <1-100 7-280
Cement 7-180 7-240 24-850
Tiles 30-200 20-200 160-1410
Phosphogypsum 4-700 19360 25-120
Blast furnace slag stone and cement 30-120 30-220 –
So, while near the Fukishima (and Chernobyl) reactors the levels are lethal or very dangerous, ocean water levels of 3Bq/m3 are (as the article states) many orders of magnitude below any concern, considering that natural radiation is around 14Bq/L – and a liter is much smaller than a cubic meter…(what your original article puts forward – the 3Bq/m3)
From Dailykos.com
The average radioactivity of seawater is about 14 Bq/L of which 88% is from naturally occurring potassium-40 (K-40). About 7% is from anthropogenic fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing and nuclear accidents like Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima Daiichi (2011). So there is about 13 Bq/L of natural radioactivity on average is the oceans. The rest of both links is also interesting to read to put some perspective on radiation and everyday life.
On the other hand Solar Power Satellites seem to be the best way to generate power for humans, we can do it with current technology and have real power transmitted to earth within ten years. Better than the payback for fusion research has been (so far)!
With regard to solar satellites I recall similar claims that they would be viable in a decade. Trouble is those claims were made 40 years ago. In 1973 Peter Glaser was granted U.S. patent number 3,781,647 for his method of transmitting power from a satellite to ground using microwaves from a very large antenna (up to one square kilometer) on the satellite to a much larger one, now known as a rectenna, on the ground.
Now setting aside the technical issues involved in the transmission and the associated risks the real killer is the cost to orbit of the SPS. Studies showed launch costs need to be around L $100–$200 per kilogram of payload to low Earth orbit are needed if SPS are to be economically viable. Current launch costs vary from $3000 to $13000 per kg, Larger launch weights tend to be in the more expensive range with the average for sizable satellites being around $10,000 per kg.
How much caesium 137 or strontium 90 would be normal in building materials or sea water?
Are these readings from “natural radiation”?
http://www.enviroreporter.com/2014/12/sky-high-radiation-readings-across-the-u-s/
All must be fine. We have NOAA and the EPA keeping a close eye on things. Readers here have complete faith in these organisations, I’m sure.
the most dangerous radioactive isotopes are those qwith a short half life. Long half lives tend to be less radioactive.
Forget solar, go for Liquid thorium reactors. plenty of fuel and no possibility of runnaway chain reactions.
So far, the payback on fusion is zero. And the payback on solar power satellites is zero. Are you saying one zero is better than the other?
If I had to choose I’d put my money on fusion. Both technologies could be made to work. When they’re both viable I’d guess fusion would be hundreds of times cheaper.
Chris
Jolly Farmer: Re “skyrocketing” beta measurements. Beta emitters are created in our atmosphere as the result of cosmic radiation and high energy particles interacting with the earth’s atmospheric molecules. The predominant beta emitter is carbon-14 and other beta emitting nuclides include H-3 and Be-10. A nice blast from the sun will increase the number of beta emitters in the atmosphere. Just saying that there is an uptick in atmospheric beta measurements doesn’t mean squat without an analysis of the nuclide(s) causing the uptick. If an analysis shows an uptick in these natural radionuclides, it is probably due to the sun. Other natural air borne beta emitters includes Radon daughter products which are and can be released via a number of mechanisms including man stirring up the earth, a volcano or a forest fire. The article you cite is just another alarmist, Chicken Little article. I know for a fact that the cited measuring stations analyze for the nuclides. The article made no attempt to include this information. Deception by omission.
Solar satellites will never fly – because the only difference between a solar satellite and a directed energy weapon is targeting.
jolly farmer
December 11, 2014 at 1:55 am
How much caesium 137 or strontium 90 would be normal in building materials or sea water?
Are these readings from “natural radiation”?
http://www.enviroreporter.com/2014/12/sky-high-radiation-readings-across-the-u-s/
All must be fine. We have NOAA and the EPA keeping a close eye on things. Readers here have complete faith in these organisations, I’m sure.
The levels of those isotopes wold be directly related to the age, composition and source of the materials. Uranium accumulates in clays and silts for instance, so there would be background levels of Cs and Sr in the those materials in proportion to the parent isotope levels. Same goes for sea water. You also want to toss in K-40, commonly found in bananas and which occurs in the bananas at such levels that large shipments can occasionally trip radiation alarms in shipping terminals.
As regards radiation levels, you run into some issues that are “precautionary” – think lawyer speak – as opposed to “scientific.” Current assessments of risk from radiation are based on a linear extrapolation from known levels of serious hazard and a simpleminded assumption that less is always better. However, there is increasing evidence that if exposures drop below> certain levels then the kinds of disease processes associated with radiation begin to increase once more. There is also some active research into why this might be and the best evidence seems to be that we actually need some exposure to keep chromosomal repair mechanisms tuned up and operating properly. Too much radiation and they are swamped by damage and simply can’t keep up. Too little and they slack off and damage accumulates without repair. There is no fixed level of “natural” background radiation and in fact Svensmark’s cosmic-ray hypothesis regarding cloud formation leans on “natural” cosmic radiation variability, mediated by the sun, as a causal agent in cloud formation.
I can imagine the “streamers” that would be produced by that microwave power beam! Hate to be in an airplane that gets off course in bad weather…
Well Keith it sounds to me that “Rectenna” is an appropriate name for that contraption; it’s really a shitty idea.
The problem of gathering solar energy is quite simple to understand.
At the moment without being touched by human hand, solar energy reaches us at ground level at about 1KW/m^2 under ideal conditions. I have an electricity source just a few feet from where I am typing that is several megawatts per square meter.
So the trouble with free clean green renewable solar energy, is that it is spread so thinly, and it is NOT cheap to gather that free stuff up.
Even so, it fries our brains if we spend too much time out in it at that radiant incidence level.
So if we gather it in space where we can get it cranked all the way up to 1360 W/m^2 (I thought the number was 342 ?) Wow, and we have to launch all that tonnage of collector up into orbit for a 36% gain in energy density. Remember how damn big that Tonopah collector is in California ?
So now we transmit if down to earth. Whooopee !! Do we transmit it to reach earth at more than 1,000 W/m^2 so we have a smaller cheaper collector; but one that will incinerate our brains faster, or do we thin it out some more, so that surfers can play in it all day without getting rectennated.
So now how big does a rectennal solar farm have to be ??
Seems like this makes loons look highly intelligent.
Well they are pretty anyhow.
“””””…..If I had to choose I’d put my money on fusion. Both technologies could be made to work. When they’re both viable I’d guess fusion would be hundreds of times cheaper.
Chris…..”””””
Well Chris, you would be betting on a sure loser. What is your basis for stating: “Both Technologies could be made to work. ” ??
Fusion does work in the sun and other stars, but the real energy source there is Gravitation, which sucks.
There isn’t enough raw materials or space, on earth to make a gravity powered fusion reactor.
And the only other available force to use to create controlled fusion is the Coulomb force of electro-magnetism, and EM does not suck; it blows.
So trying to compress a hot plasma with the Coulomb force, is like trying to PUSH a railway train full of coal with a piece of rope.
There’s an annoying little theorem, known as Earnshaw’s theorem, that says that can’t work.
So nyet on earthly fusion.
That’s one of the things about nuclear science. Before we ever touched it, or used it, or created bombs with it… radiation was extremely well understood. We have the ability to record levels of radioactivity that are as harmless as a banana. So whenever I see these numbers about Fukushima, or Three Mile Island, or for that matter even Chernobyl and Pripyat, I don’t worry.
Since I spent several years working at a nuclear facility, I had to take courses and learn a lot more about it than the average person ever does. I still remember taking a meter into downtown Banff (in the mountains) and recording levels higher than in our shop.
I trust the people involved in tracking Fukushima, because I used to work with one of them. I’ve never met a more honest man, or a group of people more dedicated to safety.
What do these “dedicated” people have to say about the efforts to stop the flow of contaminated water by establishing an ice wall?
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/11/22/national/tepco-fails-to-halt-toxic-water-inflow-at-fukushima-no-1-trenches#.VIlrU5VujIU
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201411220029
I’m sure the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan are pleased at the dedication of this “group of people.
http://enenews.com/cbs-2-sailors-dead-after-fukushima-radiation-exposure-reporter-served-uss-reagan-feel-like-wrong-critical-health-risk-all-onboard-feel-people-realizing-serious-issue-video
Well jolly, the articles you cite about the “ice wall” are actually about the trenches, a completely different issue. The ice wall is technology that has been used before (although not specifically for radioactive contamination). Without it many tunnelling projects, like Boston’s “Big Dig”, would have been much more difficult.
As for the USS Reagan, they got exposed to less radiation than the flight crew on a trans-Pacidic passenger plane. And citing enenews is a joke right?
@ur momisugly Jolly Farmer:
Natural Radioactivity by the Ocean (Per Liter average for each nuclide listed first; total activity in oceans follows); Activity
Nuclide Per Liter Pacific Atlantic All Oceans
Uranium 33 mBq/L 22 EBq 11 EBq 41 EBq
Potassium 11 Bq/L 7400 EBq 3300 EBq 14000 EBq
Tritium 0.6 mBq/L 370 PBq 190 PBq 740 PBq
Carbon 14 5 mBq/L 3 EBq 1.5 EBq 6.7 EBq
Rubidium 87 1.1 Bq/L 700 EBq 330 EBq 1300 EBq
The activities used in the table are from 1971 Radioactivity in the Marine Environment, National Academy of Sciences. The total activities calculated for individual and all oceans are derived from the first column multiplied by the volume (data available) of the oceans. 1 Bq= 1 disintegration/second.
EBq = 10E18 (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) PBq=10E21. There are other naturally occurring nuclides in the ocean. The per liter sum of just these five nuclides is 12.13 Bq/L.
The articles you cite indicate up to 2 Bq/liter of Cs-137 detected in the water. As one article indicates, this activity is well below any health concern standards. As all sea critters are bathed in 12 Bq/L anyway, does anyone think an extra 1 or 2 Bq is going to make any difference or danger? Activity levels were likely twice as high when life began in the seas and sea critters are well adapted these extremely low levels of radiation.
Dang, I’ve got to learn how to get a proper table posted. Advice requested.
Hello aGrimm,
To add a table use preformatted text.
The explanation can be found in Ric Werme’s guide to WUWT (link on the right of the page) or here
I am trying out creating a table using the free for Microsoft Windows, Windows Live Writer. I have copied the source, lets see if I got it right:
Activity
Nuclide Per Liter
Pacific
Atlantic
All Oceans
Uranium
33 mBq/L
22 EBq
11 EBq
41 EBq
Potassium
11 Bq/L
7400 EBq
3300 EBq
14000 EBq
Tritium
0.6 mBq/L
370 PBq
190 PBq
740 PBq
Carbon
14 5 mBq/L
3 EBq
1.5 EBq
6.7 EBq
Rubidium 87
1.1 Bq/L
700 EBq
330 EBq
1300 EBq
Well, it worked on my wordpress site. Probably something to do with what theme is used.
https://garymount.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/test-table/
I wouldn’t worry about any claim made by “enenews” either. Anti-nuclear fear propaganda does the same thing with exaggeratedly ginormous sounding sums without factoring what those levels actually indicate when broken down into a relative context.
enenews is a news aggregator. There are no “claims”. For example, would you expect NHK to put out anti-nuclear propaganda?
Pointing out that three reactor cores melted down, four spent fuel pools were damaged, and that attempts to bring the situation under control are failing is not propaganda.
Would you class the “ginormous sounding sums” that can be found in reports from TEPCO as “anti-nuclear fear propaganda”?
9 months to tame nuclear plant?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704613504576268470471321638
Not going so well, is it?
enenews is as much a ‘news aggregator’ as the National Enquirer is.
No fuel pools were damaged.
The situation is being controlled.
“For example, would you expect NHK to put out anti-nuclear propaganda?”
I would expect NHK to go crazy because Japanese are very scared of radioactivity.
In Fukushima, there was up to 965 Bq/l radioactivity in water due to Iodine-131. In Finland the average natural radioactivity in drilled well water is 460 Bq/l. Average. All natural radon gas.
Jolly Farmer – you should never fly. There is a lot of radiation at 10 km altitude. Even at the altitude of Denver, CO or Santa Fe, NM there is an increased radiation.
Jolly Farmer: you ask how much radioactivity there is in common building materials. Here is the Health Physics Society website that will give you lots of information on background radiation. Note that data is presented in Ci and Bq. These are just different units that measure the same thing. Building materials are listed about halfway down.
http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/natural.htm
Cesium is a biological analog of calcium. Calcium is used in all sorts of biological processes, e.g. neuronal transmissions and bone building. There is a vast amount of calcium in the oceans. Biological organisms will take-up cesium proportionally to the calcium/cesium concentrations. Therefore there is normally very little take-up of cesium in ocean organisms because there is very, very little radioactive cesium in the oceans. Additionally, the natural turn-over of cesium in an organism mimics the natural turnover of calcium so it is unlikely any accumulative effect will be seen. Disclaimer: I can’t be sure this is true for all oceanic organisms, but I have some knowledge it is true in fish. Fish caught within the relatively undiluted plume near Fukishima did contain radionuclides from it, but I’ll have to find the studies that tell what nuclides and how much. My recollection is that the fish were approaching concern levels, but not considered particularly dangerous.
I am aware that there is background radiation. My concern is for caesium 134, 137, strontium 90 and Lord knows what else leaching into the Pacific. Very little monitoring is being done.
TEPCO doesn’t know where the 3 coriums are. They hope to have robot technology to allow a clean-up to start in 2020. Don’t hold your breath.
“Very little monitoring is being done”
Define “very little”.
Cesium 137 is radioactive but natural cesium extracted from a mine is not. Most cesium is used in making a liquid called cesium formate which is a low viscosity heavy liquid (2.4 g/l or ~ 21/2 times the weight of a litre of water). It is used as a drilling fluid in deep oil wells (North Sea, etc.) for floating the drill cuttings and as a counterweight to the oil in the reservoir to control well finishing. Alternative solid powders slurried in the drill water for weighting agents, like barite, make the fluid too viscous for deep wells.
Remarkably, tests on toxicity showed cesium formate it to be completely benign to humans and the environment. It is inert and even at high temperatures and pressures at depth with harsh reactants like hydrogen sulphide in the oil formation, it is unreactive. Because of its density and low viscosity it is also easily recovered. A saturated solution, containing about 70% cesium formate, sells for ~$6,000/barrel, so yeah, you want to recover it.
The question I would ask is: if the (many) above ground nuclear tests in the Pacific seem to not have had any detectable effect – why then would Fukushima?
No, cesium is close to potassium. Strontium is close to calcium. Look at the periodic table.
HTH
Enenews has having a mental meltdown about the Fukushima incident since it first occurred.
It is to nuclear engineering what 350.org is to climate science.
Actually, it’s worse in it’s complete misrepresentation of the facts:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231014009121
Need I re-quote George Carlin from the 5 December post here on WUWT?
“And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” “Plastic… asshole.” -George Carlin
And in other news
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
Seems like 269,000 tonnes is about the size of one modern oil tanker or container ship.
The ocean can probably swallow such ships without so much as a burp.
Not a fan of seeing turtles et al with plastic necklaces; but if all of that junk is coagulating in that one place, seems like a good place to go wit a couple of empty takers and scoop all that stuff up.
As a sea angler I hate the stuff, always catching on your lines and lures.
Okay perhaps fish don’t suffer too much, but turtles do, many turtles have died from ingesting plastic.
The principal problem here is that bananas need some kind of protective covering during the growing phase, so plastic sheeting is used. Heavy rains wash the plastic sheets down to sea and the turtles mistake them for one of their favourite foods jellyfish.
Just another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Thanks, Stuart. I don’t like it either, for the reasons you list. However, despite finding evidence that sea turtles ingest plastic, and that occasionally it may kill one, I don’t find anyone making your claim that “many turtles have died from ingesting plastic”. Do you have a scientific citation for that claim? Because I just laugh at puff pieces from Greenpeace and the like …
w.
I cannot cite, though it is well known that in Moreton Bay (Brisbane, my home) nearly all dead turtles were victims of “Floating Disease” caused by ingesting plastic bags. I’ve supported one while waiting for Parks and Wildlife to turn up, poor bugger couldn’t dive.
The local boffins stopped publishing the data, because it directly conflicted with the story the dirty bloody Greenies were trying to sell that it was Recreational Anglers killing them with boats.
Same way they failed to tell the press that the Dugong hit by a prop was likely dead already, and that the prop was at least 400mm in diameter. Ferry, you stupid #######.
Willis: again thanks for another common sense article. If it doesn’t dissolve, it will collect ocean life. I’ve scraped enough hulls to know this only too well. Barnacles = nature’s rasp.
The distribution of the debris is far from uniform, the Hawaiian islands seem to be and area of concentration, e.g.:
http://coastalcare.org/wp-content/images/issues/pollution/plastic/Hawaii-shores.jpg
http://coastalcare.org/wp-content/images/issues/pollution/plastic/layson-island.jpg
Marine birds frequently consume plastic which can cause their death, check out how much plastic this albatross had consumed:
http://coastalcare.org/wp-content/images/issues/pollution/plastic/Midway-bird-corpse-2.jpg
Entanglement of large sea mammals with nets is well-known:
http://coastalcare.org/wp-content/images/issues/pollution/plastic/Seal-entangled.jpg
Would that be Fukushima debris on those Hawaiian beaches? –AGF
There is a lot of scientific literature showing the incidents and effects of plastic on seabirds, marine mammals and other marine life. It is well documented. You should look it up, obviously you have something to learn!
jon December 12, 2014 at 5:25 pm
Thanks, jon. There’s always much for me to learn … but you waving your hands and making unsupported and unreferenced claims about how terrible it all is doesn’t help me learn anything.
If you’d provide some citations to the claims you are making we could all learn something.
w.
So its turtles all the way down!
200 grams of plastic for every BILLION tonnes of sea water
= 1 part plastic per 5 trillion parts ocean.
“The solution to pollution is dilution.”
Much of the plastic floats, and doesn’t dilute.
Assuming scrap plastic is worth $300 per ton, it is 81 million dollars of plastic
Subtract recovery cost; likely to put it in the minus column for recovered value. Also destruction of attached sea life- see Wills’ photo.
Willis,
The majority of plastic floats on the surface so your calculation of 200g plastic per billion tonnes of water may be a tad misleading. Perhaps an area calculation is more appropriate.
In any event, I have no problems with floating plastic as it provides a habitat and shelter for many species – not unlike natural rafts of pumice and volcanic ash which can form thick floating ‘Islands’ many kilometres across.
Maybe thats the answer – we need to add something to the plastic to make it heavier.
Normally this is done by adding analogues of carbon. For example, the analogue chosen for making venetian blinds heavy is (or used to be) lead – chemically lead resembles carbon in many respects, it can participate in many of the same chemical reactions, which is maybe part of the reason why lead is so horribly toxic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table#mediaviewer/File:Periodic_table_(polyatomic).svg
There are other alternatives, such as silicon – oh dang, lets just use glass… 🙂
In 20 years of sailing the oceans I didn’t find plastic to be much of an issue except near large cities in the developing world. Lots of third world countries dump plastic in the ocean and wait for the tides to take it away.
New years day on Phi Phi Island, Thailand some years back the harbor was full of thousands of floating black plastic garbage bags from the early morning cleanup. We were at anchor and could almost walk to shore on the bags they were that thick.
Nylon is heavier than sea water and normally sinks to the bottom. Poly is lighter than sea water and floats.
nylon nets and lines will sink to the bottom unless buoyed by floats. Poly floats on the surface until enough life grows on it to sink to the bottom, or until it washes ashore.
Sunlight breaks down poly fairly rapidly, but UV resistance can be improved through additives (black poly typically last longer than yellow). nylon is resistant to UV.
Floating poly is an advantage if you are anchoring in coral. It will float free, while nylon will sink and chafe until it fails. Pure chain will wrap itself around the coral as the boat shift on the tide, ever shorting until either the boat is pulled under or the chain breaks. So a poly rode with a chain head is preferred. A float (use an inflated fender) at the chain/poly junction will float the end of the chain above the coral, so the poly doesn’t chafe.
Black plastic bags are a real menace in SE Asia. They float just under the surface and get wound around propeller shafts, working their way past the seals and gumming up the shaft bearings, overloading the engine. The problem can be hard to find.
Well adding weight needlessly to plastics, simply increases shipping costs in all kinds of ways. Cardboard boxes for shipping heavier items need to be reinforced, further increasing the shipping costs and also the tonnage of stuff that needs recycling.
Increasing the weight of something is almost never a productive idea.
But the packaging of consumer and consumable products is a way overbloated industry anyway.
My wife sometimes pays over $32 per gallon for drinking water, which she gets in little 4 or 6 ounce plastic bottles. And they say gasoline is expensive.
The bubble package is one of the dumbest inventions of a supermarket trained naked ape.
My local “green” supermarket, that prides itself in its greenness, and charges more than double the price for some stuff such as “organic” brown eggs, which my wife thinks are great. Eggs are white and yellow and come in an almost hermetic package, that doesn’t get sprayed on.
And if you buy the pricy “organic” milk, you can then walk over to the opposite corner of the green store, and purchase every imaginable chemical additive that you want to add to your organic foods, including 57 varieties of Omega 3 / 6 fish oils, that come from grinding up the krill that whales want to eat or all the menhaden or sardines, that game (food) fishes eat.
Any wonder the sea is losing its food fish, when all the bait species are being slaughtered for yuppie food additive chemicals. I believe you can buy chemical food additives in our green store that start with every letter of the alphabet from A to Z, and then a bunch of Greek ones also.
But the locals who frequent the place are deserving of being fleeced anyway. They are the ones who vote for the duffers who run California.
But I’m with Willis. Never toss anything plastic into the ocean. The rule I like to use on adding stuff to the ocean is very simple and understandable.
Don’t put anything in the ocean until after you have eaten it. (or drunk it).
Yes, I came to post this as well. I think the article would do well to include a calculation per sq km of ocean surface.
It’s about 900g per square km, still a small number.
No power here, big storm, much rain, hooray!
W.
Should be enough out there Willis that you could even go out there and waterboard yourself.
Could be an interesting experiment.
G
So your calculation was very wrong then. You assumed that there are observation of plastic all the way to the bottom of the oceans. Quite a feat. Erikson’s observations are from the uppermost 1 meter…..
Embarrassing. Big numbers. Enormous mistake on your part. Perhaps you should correct your mistaken calculation?
Willis,
Since barnacles and other marine life eventually weight the floating plastic down to the point that it sinks and some percentage eventually washes ashore, I imagine the real answer is somewhere between your two calculations. It depends on whether the estimates given were for the total amount of plastic ever dumped into the oceans or the amount currently floating. I’m guessing it is for the total amount ever dumped. For that case we would need to know the half-life of the plastic. That should be the the amount of time needed for half of it to leave the near surface sink to the bottom or was ashore.
Looking at the picture provided and sailing a few years in the N.W. Caribbean where an awful lot is dumped daily, I would bet the half-life to be somewhere between 2 and 5 years.
rooter December 12, 2014 at 5:18 am Edit
First, a lot of the plastic, particularly the small stuff, sinks to the bottom. That’s why Erikson’s figures are not observations. They are the result of a computer model that figured out the total plastic in the entire volume of the ocean, not just the top metre of the ocean as you claim.
Next, for those that wanted a figure per square metre, I gave that in the comment you are replying to … which you seem not to have noticed when you say I should “correct my mistaken calculation”. Been there, done that, open your eyes.
Finally, in fact the answer is likely somewhere in between the two estimates (200 grams per square km and 900 grams per cubic km) … and in neither case is my calculation an “enormous mistake”, nor are any of the numbers “big numbers”. No matter how you try to spin it, it’s still less than a kilo of plastic, whether per square or cubic kilometre.
Sorry, rooter, but your claims are rooted …
w.
PS—Entering a conversation with your first comment being so aggro is very bad tactics. It turns people against you immediately, and makes it much less likely that you’ll get traction even if you were right. And when you’re wrong, as in this case, it just makes you look petty and vindictive.
You could do yourself a service by reading the study Willis:
“However, we stress that our estimates are highly conservative, and may be considered minimum estimates. Our estimates of macroplastic are based on a limited inventory of ocean observations, and would be vastly improved with standardization of methods and more observations. They also do not account for the potentially massive amount of plastic present on shorelines, on the seabed, suspended in the water column, and within organisms.”
You didn’t even read the title:
“Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea”
Afloat Willis. Afloat.
Your calculation is just wrong. Correct it.
Perhaps traction is not for you.
“Per cubic km of the ocean” seems like the wrong measurement, since plastic tends to remain near the surface of the ocean. Wouldn’t it be more accurate only to count surface water?
Also, plastics break down into smaller and smaller pieces basically forever, so it seems reasonable that all plastic in the ocean will eventually become food, not substrate.
I believe he did: “The density is much higher than the global average, but it’s still only about 2-3 kg per cubic kilometre, or about 5 kg/square km.”
Not food, per se, but roughage. Plastics, especially polyethylene, are routinely added to cattle feed to provide, supplement, or replace roughage. Plastic pellets can be recovered, washed, and recycled, another advantage over natural roughage.
What a relief. My hens just ate a bunch of styrofoam. So they will be fine.
I don’t think we’ll do the recovery unless maybe it will help the girls remember to feed the hens and not to leave any shipping materials outside.
I was wondering about plastics breaking down and would like to know what actually happens at that point. Will it be food? Or will it be a harmful substance? Are some plastics more destructive that others?
Thanks for an interesting question, Hexe. One of the more curious recent findings is that much of the small plastic has “divots”, small areas that appear to have been eaten by some kind of creature or another. I would assume that there are bacteria that are capable of consuming plastic, because there is a goodly amount of energy locked up in it.
w.
I certainly don’t want to see sea turtles or any other sea life maimed & killed in this way. I live in Hervey Bay, Qld, Australia & there are very many turtles here. I see some every time I go out fishing (recreational) or whale watching .
Plastic rubbish more likely washes up on the seaward side of Fraser Island.
The real reason for posting is to express how absolutely proud I am of our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, our Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and the whole of our current government.
They are standing up to the strategic barrage of the insidious green blob. Well done & keep going in this noble fight.
Great News – Bill McKibben announced that between the Keystone & Galilee Basin, the Lima talks are a waste of time. YAHOO BILL!!! Thanks for the great news.
Lastly, Tony Abbott today announced that we are planning to help the Ukraine with Uranium & Coal. These people surely need help as do so many others. People around the world, with a genuine heart, do care.
I don’t want to diminish the problem and don’t like poor stewardship of resources. But I’ve always wondered about the consensus question. If plastic were CO2 and sea level were temperature, I’m sure you could find 97% or more of scientists responding to a carefully crafted poll somewhere to agree that mankind via hydrocarbon via plastics is causing sea level to rise, and I’m sure someone could put spin on it to raise taxes or other costs to the public.
It may not be the apocolytic disaster infered, but Id still be happier to have governments spending money to remove plastic from the oceans rather than on trying to reduce CO2
Do what we do, when you see some plastic rubbish lying in the street, pick it up and put it in a waste bin. If enough folk do that every day as a matter of habit things would get better very quickly.
reminds me of a Philipino friend I was visiting many years ago. He was commenting on how much trash was strewn about the neighborhood as he proceeded to un wrap a fresh pack of cigarettes and throw the empty pack and wrapper from the new pack on the ground. I pointed out much as you stated Keitho, if he would stop adding to the problem and pick up a little extra then there would be no trash problem. There was a glimmer but not sure if he took the “lesson” to heart.
Cheers,
Joe
According to the NOAA website there is about 20,000,000,000 Kg of Gold dissolved in the Ocean, so it would seem that our Gold pollution problem is more pressing than our plastic pollution problem. Frankly, removing all that gold seems the more attractive prospect because … gold.
Most people do not have a good feel for numbers. It is high time we started getting honest with one another as to what skills people actually possess. Rather than our current high-stakes testing which creates a culture of deception and pedagogy aimed at creating successful test-takers on a deadline, we should transition to proper mastery based training whose end-point is a mastered skill rather than an arbitrary calendar date.
We have done a poor job of teaching people what they don’t know.
“We have done a poor job of teaching people what they don’t know.”
Common sense and critical thinking, a dying art…
Too much Critical Theory and not enough critical thinking.
I forget the name of the comedian, but he has a full bit on how horrid the grapefruit is, and how it co-opts the good name of the humble grape. Seems they named the grapefruit after the grape (in the comedy routine) so that people would think it actually might taste good. But the only thing good about the grapefruit is that it can be used to measure the size of tumours…
I think good reports such as Willis’ here might be enhanced if the ratio could be reduced to, say, a swimming pool or a bathtub. Or a grapefruit…
269,000 tonnes of plastic versus 20,000,000 tonnes of Gold
so there is approximately 100 times more gold pollution in the oceans than plastic pollution.
I suspect that gold is about 100 times as heavy as most plastics.
Removing all that gold from the ocean is a dumb idea.
Gold, (the riches of the Americas) caused the first period of runaway inflation in history, in the Elizabethan 1500s.
Spanish pirate plundered the Americas, and carted all that useless metal (almost, back then) off to Europe, where people were too busy getting drunk on wine, to bother producing anything of value (consumer goods), so the price of everything went up to absorb all the cash floating around.
The consumer price index went up by a factor of 6 in about 75 years, and then leveled off.
England escaped that inflation, because Queen Elizabeth I met the English pirates at the docks, and confiscated what they had stolen off the Spanish pirates, and she threw it all in the Royal coffers. Basically used it to buy the British Empire.
After that, the CPI stayed level at the new 6X level until the USA went off the gold standard in the 1930s. Then it started on a new inflationary ramp at about the same growth rate as in the 1500s, and we have been on that ramp ever since, as governments all around the world try to outdo each other in printing money, without making anything more to buy with it.
So leave all that useless gold in the ocean where it belongs; we have no good use for it, other than making more Italian Gold chains to wear around our necks.
Mr. T would drown in a flash if he actually went and jumped into the ocean. but that would return some gold to where it properly belongs.
I’m with the Rhine Maidens on that; leave the gold in the water.
Except for me. I want some of that gold. But nobody else. Actually, George, I’ll share some of it with you. But nobody else. Wouldn’t want to disrupt the economy any more than it already is.
I don’t need much, just enough to buy a private 747 and keep it maintained and fueled for the rest of my life, and a few houses and other toys, and maybe enough to buy a few elections and Senators, Congressmen, and Judges.
Oh look… I’m starting to think like a liberal.
Don’t forget… most countries uses scheduled inflation to effectively deflate the value of their national debts.
You must be a Rip van Winkle type; A 747 !!
Hell, what I want in my garage, with fuel ticket, is an F-22 Raptor. I’d settle for a quad of 20 mm cannons, with a red button on the gear stick of my Subaru Impreza. I don’t like traffic jams.
G
I’m not a big proponent of Wikipedia – however for a simplistic explanation here – its worthwhile. Willis is even more right than he states:
“The Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre of marine debris particles in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N and 42°N.[1] The patch extends over an indeterminate area, with estimates ranging very widely depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define the affected area.
The patch is characterized by exceptionally high relative concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.[2] Despite its enormous size and density (4 particles per cubic meter), the patch is not visible from satellite photography, nor is it necessarily detectable to casual boaters or divers in the area, as it consists primarily of a small increase in suspended, often microscopic particles in the upper water column.”
Not typically visible to even boaters in the area … consists mostly of a small increase in suspended microscopic particles. While there are areas of visible debris they tend to be exception not the rule.
Certain weather patterns are conducive to breaking off larger more durable debris at times, which is why for example the Hawaiian island of Kauai at times see ocean debris wash on shore. In particular highly coveted Japanese glass fishing floats (and at times bottles) – some of which have been at sea for decades.
Don’t forget that flotilla of rubber ducks! http://www.rubaduck.com/news/rubber-ducks-circumnavigate-globe
And they chose a junked CHRISTMAS TREE because……..?
……because someone just became an atheist ?
Are there photos of the vast plastic collection at the great Pacific Gyre?
There are, but all you can see is water.
Yes, there are many pictures. They show bottles, bags, baubles, bangles, all sorts of stuff. Unfortunately, they’re all faked. Mostly used on econut sites to fool the gullible.
Having spent many happy hours on beaches on holiday looking at all the stuff the tide brings in, trying to identify what it was and how long it had been in the water. Much of what washes ashore in the UK has not been in the sea long but any that had been around for some time had much growth on it like it’s own little ecosystem.
As for the point about radiation back in the days of the protests at Greenham Common someone said they had a list of “military establishments” that had high incidents of some types of cancer. There was as expected a call for this list to be published in the public interest, it was of places like Edinburgh castle and such like all on granite bedrock.
James Bull
James Bull
Also they assume that the plastic never ever ever breaks down completely but just floats around in smaller and smaller bits but like the oil in the Gulf of Mexico there are bugs that like the stuff to eat. Not my cup of tea but each to it’s own.
James Bull
I would assume that UV is breaking it down as well.
People have asked here about surface area and plastic so I’ve done a few calculations as I wondered about it myself.
Using the following figures:
– standard grocery bag at 5.5g area 30cm by 50cm when laid out flat
– Worlds Oceans 335,258,000 km2
I calculate that the 270E6 kg of plastic equates to 7,364km2 of plastic in the oceans which is approx. 22m2 plastic per km2 of ocean (or 0.0022% area coverage).
However, not all plastic as the surface area to mass of a grocery bag as thicker things like ropes and plastic parts would be much less.
In reality, due to some plastic sinking and lower surface area/weight plastic parts the figure is much lower than 22m2 per km2 of ocean and is probably much lower than 10m2 per km2. Still something of a pollution problem but helps to put a feel on the figures.
I’m open to correction on my figures as I’ve done them quickly.
You are right to put these figures in context. When put in their proper context, they are frequently so trivial that it becomes extraordinary that there is any significant concern.
The ‘greens’ automatic reaction that anything manmade in the oceans is bad. Sometimes that will be the case, but often it will not. They frequently protest about the sinking of oil rigs or wrecks, and yet the evidence is that these assist biodiversity, and provide useful habitat for many living organismsa nd life forms.
Just a typical Guardian article which appeals to the non enequiring mind of the typical Guardian reader who lap up the fodder. It is their stapple diet.
Let’s not forget the Greenpeace ship ‘Rainbow Warrior’ that was bombed by the French DGSE Intelligence Service in Auckland Harbour in 1985. It was sunk with Greenpeace blessing and celebration in Northland, NZ for use as a diving site by tourists, no doubt many of whom are Greenpeacers and opposed to marine pollution!
Did they take the crew off first this time?
ddpalmer
December 11, 2014 at 2:22 am
Well jolly, the articles you cite about the “ice wall” are actually about the trenches, a completely different issue. The ice wall is technology that has been used before (although not specifically for radioactive contamination). Without it many tunnelling projects, like Boston’s “Big Dig”, would have been much more difficult.
As for the USS Reagan, they got exposed to less radiation than the flight crew on a trans-Pacidic passenger plane. And citing enenews is a joke right?
The issue is the failed effort to stop the flow of contaminated water. No ice wall has been established at Fukushima Daiichi.
The sailors will get their day in court. At least, those that are still alive:
http://www.stripes.com/news/judge-sailors-class-action-suit-can-proceed-over-alleged-radiation-exposure-1.311088
enenews is an aggregator. The information comes from many sources.
I don’t find any of this at all funny.
jolly farmer,
Go troll somewhere else.
The issue is plastic debris in the ocean. You have attempted to hijack the topic into a discussion of your declining to listen to facts about radiation.
People have patiently pointed out the lack of danger. You decline to think. Sort of like the people who publish a photograph of life abundantly taking advantage of some plastic debris and then claiming that plastic is killing the life in the ocean.
[blockquote]The issue is the failed effort to stop the flow of contaminated water. No ice wall has been established at Fukushima Daiichi.[/blockquote]
The issue is that your cited websites are NOT ABOUT THE ICE WALL.
[blockquote]The sailors will get their day in court. At least, those that are still alive:[/blockquote]
Never said they wouldn’t. But getting your day in court and winning are two totally different things. You see over the last 100+ years scientists have done a lot of research into radiation and have a pretty good handle on what levels are safe and on what illnesses it can cause. The Reagan was exposed to levels well below the point where illnesses occur and the illnesses reported are almost all known not to be caused by radiation.
Add in the fact that the people of Fukushima prefecture, who were exposed to the same radiation at much higher levels and for a much longer time are not reporting such illnesses. They have an almost insurmountable hurdle to clear.
Oh, I expect if it goes to a jury they might initially win on a sympathy vote, but on appeal they will lose.
[blockquote]I don’t find any of this at all funny.[/blockquote]
Well I am finding a lot of humor in your comments.
They haven’t even started to TRY and establish the ice wall yet. they are still installing the pipes.
More details on how the ice wall plan is going :
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201407090052
ddpalmer,
jolly farmer is wasting his 15 minutes.
jolly will you please actually read the links you post. Or are you trying to make yourself look foolish? Or maybe you think the readers will just take your word for what your links say and not click on them?
You have again posted a link that is about the trenches and NOT the ice wall. Oh sure, the writer makes a half-hearted attempt to equate the two things but reading the article it is clear that the article has nothing to do with the ice wall.
Hi Willis,
Whilst I’m certainly no fan of the Guardian, could you clarify your calculation of weight of plastic per volume of sea water. Are the volume figures for the whole extent of the Earth’s oceans. If so that supposes that the plastic is uniformly distributed at all depths. Is this the case or is a greater proportion found near the surface. Whichever way I agree there’s too much of it.
I am fortunate to live in a beach front property. As is my wont I walk the beach most days to enjoy the scenery, for exercise and to keep the beach clean of discarded detritus arising from careless human activity. There is simply no excuse for humanity to treat the ocean as a garbage disposal unit – whether the density of this garbage is measured by area or by volume. Whenever I come across a cluster of plastic bags, soft drink bottles, tooth brushes or Coke bottle tops and so on, I ask myself what kind of mother raised the source litterers up? You don’t have to be a rabid ‘greenie’ to show respect for the environment, especially those areas that are community commons, such as are our oceans. Making excuses for plain bad behavior by claiming plastic can provide habitat for some marine organisms, is akin to justifying rubbish accumulating in a person’s back yard, because it provides a habitat for rats.
As is my ‘want’
By the way, you had it right the first time: “wont” is defined as:
accustomed, used
Bill,
When I walk the beaches I typically pick up garbage as well. It is not really that big a deal and I see no reason to condemn those leave it. It is a minor annoyance at most.
We really should reduce the waste we produce in general and especially stuff that ends up in the water/sea.
However it is the actual toxins and other dangerous waste I am more concerned with. not the litter.
Hunter – Thanks for correcting my attempts to correct my English expression! However I reserve the right to condemn anyone who figuratively “craps” in “my” front yard. The number of comments I get from international tourists/backpackers querying what I’m picking up and placing in my bag as I stroll along the high tide zone is quite revealing. Generally they follow two themes – “my” patch of beach is as clean as any they have walked on and usually they also comment that they wish they could say the same for beaches in their own country. Now I’m no angel, but if you see willfully disposed beach detritus as a minor annoyance, then I would respectfully disagree with you. [But then I have been walking on the beaches in my neck of the woods for nigh on 70 years].
I make no excuses for “plain bad behavior”. I’m merely putting the problem in context.
W.
It is correct to present the plastic concentration as only being in a limited section of the ocean – probably the top 30 ft or so. Because the paper explicitly only refers to that area – since it was the only area sampled.
But I am much more interested in the points the paper makes.
1 – it uses models which it claims are conservative. We have heard this before.
2 – it’s major point is that plastic seems to be vanishing! They say that they estimate “233,400 tons of larger plastic items are afloat in the world’s oceans compared to 35,540 tons of microplastics.” This means that there is a fair amount of big stuff, but it doesn’t seem to degrade into little bits which spread around the surface waters. It goes somewhere else – eaten by bacteria or lodged in sediment, perhaps.
This latter point is the main finding, and the one which really could do with more research. In the meantime, it looks as if the ecological concerns that we will be swamped in plastic are misplaced – the stuff does degrade, and then disappears…
Yes, that’s the advantage of carbon-based plastics. Seawater, oxygen, and the UV in sunlight will eventually degrade them to harmless end products.
Like this report
Along a narrow road down an abandoned railroad grade about 20 miles northwest of Bemidji, a world-class outdoor laboratory lies among the pine trees.
In part, it marks the spot where on Aug. 20, 1979, a Lakehead Company pipeline seam split, spewing about 440,000 gallons of crude oil. It was one of the largest pipeline spills in Minnesota.
Today, the site is one of the most-studied crude oil spills in the world, and after three decades of research, it still produces important findings.
Scientists here discovered that bacteria that break down oil are everywhere, ready to go to work. Even in the northern Minnesota woods there are microbes that eat carbon and break down oil. The population of those bugs explodes when there’s oil in the ground.
“These microbes are there in very small quantities until ‘whoa, let’s have a party, we have food, we have carbon to eat,'” said Jared Trost, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who helps manage the site.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/06/03/bemidji-oil-spill-site-research
What does every have against these carbon eating microbes?
if 270 000 tons of plastics are a problem, what about the tens (or hundreds ?) of millions of tons of shipwrecks, with all the shit they contained ?
You beat me to it, paqyfelyc.
And the shipwrecks don’t seem to degrade as much as the plastic. We still find the odd bronze age or older ship lying about on the seafloor.
I remember reading about the potential of building a fleet of trawlers specifically designed to harvest the plastic from the Pacific vortex. This would be a good job for Greenpeace. Rather than standing on their boats with signs they could put all the endowment money they receive into actually DOING something tangible.
…at the bottom of the ocean.
Set up floating power plants and floating factories. Burn the stuff and use the energy for productive work. Container ships can dock at a floating terminal and then convey the product world wide.
For perspective … the US EPA estimates that “In 2012, Americans generated about 251 million tons of trash … ”
http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/2012_msw_fs.pdf
Are the oceans half empty or half full? If we assume that plastic doesn’t degrade and is therefore “for ever,” then the headline 279,000,000 kilograms of plastic is the total of all plastic released into the oceans since plastic was invented. I’d say that the oceans are much less than half full.
One of the miracles of living in a prosperous country is that every week I fill a large plastic container with stuff I don’t want any more and our municipal waste system takes it away and disposes of it. Safely. Scientifically. To the health and betterment of the citizenry.
My first question would be On what basic assumptions has that 270 million kilograms estimate of plastic in the ocean been based?
What verified and researched data source is that estimate based?
Or is it just another of those wild assed enviro green blob guesses doubled to make it look really bad, plastic is after all another nefarious fossil fuel based invention of the human species, plus an additional 80% allowance included to cover any possibility of someone suggesting that the plastic problem is of very minor consequence in the total scheme of ocean area and volume.
And it seems it might be just that as ocean life in all it’s immense diversity gets a taste for those hydro carbon based plastics.
We always without fail, badly underestimate the ability of life and Nature to adapt to just about any circumstance and to adapt to and use whatever is available to support life in all it’s uncountable myriad forms.
[ global warning catastrophists please note the above comment ]
The plastic / bio-organisms / sea life interaction has already been the subject of a couple of quite recent studies, one from the University of Western Australia and another from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute;
Quoted from the MIT / WHOI study abstract;
http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/06/Ocean-Plastics-Host-Surprising-Microbial.html
“Ocean Plastics Host Surprising Microbial Array”
Abstract selections;
But much still remains unknown about the ecological impacts of these materials. So a group of Massachusetts researchers, led by Linda A. Amaral-Zettler at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Tracy J. Mincer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, decided to study the microbial communities found on plastics to explore how the organisms affect marine environments.
The team analyzed plastic samples they collected during two research cruises to the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, a stretch of ocean roughly midway between the eastern coast of North America and Africa. They used a scanning electron microscope, among other techniques, to study the bacteria living on the particles. “What we found really blew us across the room,” says Mincer, a microbial ecologist:
They couldn’t say for sure, but the bacteria appeared to burrow pits into the plastic, which had never been observed before. The team didn’t expect such behavior, because they thought nutrient levels in that region wouldn’t support bacteria digesting hydrocarbons in this way.
The group suspects this may at least partially explain a surprising aspect of plastic waste found in previous studies in this region of the Atlantic. Even though the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean is probably increasing, researchers at Sea Education Association, a nonprofit group that studies the ocean environment, have not found an increase in plastics in the sea (Science 2010, DOI: 10.1126/science.1192321).
Mincer says one possible explanation is that bacteria eat into the polymers, weakening the pieces enough to cause them to break down more quickly and eventually sink to the sea floor. Supporting this hypothesis, some of the plastic-burrowing bacteria are closely related to species known to consume other types of hydrocarbons, such as oil.
Because of the possible risks the debris poses to marine life, microbes breaking down plastic pollution would be a promising discovery, says Michael Cunliffe, a marine microbiologist at the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. “But it needs to be shown in a bit more detail.”
Besides the bacterial pits, the team also found evidence that the microbial communities on plastics were distinct from those found in surrounding waters. A single sample a few centimeters across could contain hundreds of microbial species. “It’s really like a microbial reef,” Mincer says.
[ cont; ]
____________________
From the Uni of Western Australia
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0100289
“Millimeter-Sized Marine Plastics: A New Pelagic Habitat for Microorganisms and Invertebrates”
Selected Abstract quotes
Millimeter-sized plastics are abundant in most marine surface waters, and known to carry fouling organisms that potentially play key roles in the fate and ecological impacts of plastic pollution. In this study we used scanning electron microscopy to characterize biodiversity of organisms on the surface of 68 small floating plastics (length range = 1.7–24.3 mm, median = 3.2 mm) from Australia-wide coastal and oceanic, tropical to temperate sample collections. Diatoms were the most diverse group of plastic colonizers, represented by 14 genera. We also recorded ‘epiplastic’ coccolithophores (7 genera), bryozoans, barnacles (Lepas spp.), a dinoflagellate (Ceratium), an isopod (Asellota), a marine worm, marine insect eggs (Halobates sp.), as well as rounded, elongated, and spiral cells putatively identified as bacteria, cyanobacteria, and fungi. Furthermore, we observed a variety of plastic surface microtextures, including pits and grooves conforming to the shape of microorganisms, suggesting that biota may play an important role in plastic degradation. This study highlights how anthropogenic millimeter-sized polymers have created a new pelagic habitat for microorganisms and invertebrates. The ecological ramifications of this phenomenon for marine organism dispersal, ocean productivity, and biotransfer of plastic-associated pollutants, remains to be elucidated.
_____________
And the abstract from the Sea Education Association’s 22 year long, from 1986 to 2008, research project on plastic accumulation referred to in the MIT paper above;
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20724586
“Plastic accumulation in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre”.
Abstract
Plastic marine pollution is a major environmental concern, yet a quantitative description of the scope of this problem in the open ocean is lacking. Here, we present a time series of plastic content at the surface of the western North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea from 1986 to 2008. More than 60% of 6136 surface plankton net tows collected buoyant plastic pieces, typically millimeters in size. The highest concentration of plastic debris was observed in subtropical latitudes and associated with the observed large-scale convergence in surface currents predicted by Ekman dynamics.
Despite a rapid increase in plastic production and disposal during this time period, no trend in plastic concentration was observed in the region of highest accumulation.
Is the figure one half billion pounds correct?
My experience tells me it is multiples of the actual amount.
I consider myself an environmentalist as I was as a youth. But I have since learned the mathematics of environmentalism:
Environmental hyper-alarmism—->
Environmental scam—->$ in the pockets of the scammers and sharpies
As in the case of global warming, sometimes that $ is my tax dollar.
“…270,000,000 kilograms of plastic works out to 200 grams of plastic per cubic kilometer of the ocean.”
That would be correct if the plastic were uniformly distributed. But most of it likely floating on the surface or sunk to the bottom. And the floating stuff mostly likely collects in clumps in much smaller regions, determined by ocean winds and currents. So I’m guessing there is generally a famine of plastic throughout the oceans, with regional areas where it collects in abundance.